The role of precedents in increasing creativity during iterative design of electronic embedded systems

• Effect of precedents on creativity during iterative design of embedded system.
• Precedents decrease design variety and do not significantly influence novelty and quality.
• Iterative design and group settings improve design utility.
• Incrementally changing the design requirements does not increase novelty.
• Groups help design evaluation but can obstruct problem framing and implementation.

This paper presents a study on the role of precedents in illuminating creative ideas during iterative design for solving open-ended problems in electronic embedded systems. Through an experimental study grounded in cognitive psychology, this work examined the influence of precedents on the novelty, variety, quality, and utility of design solutions devised through an iterative design process involving groups of participants. Another tested hypothesis was whether incremental changes of requirements improve novelty. Results show that precedents did not increase solution novelty and quality, but improved utility. Precedents reduced design feature variety as solutions converged toward a few dominant designs. Incremental modification of requirements did not increase novelty.